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The Presidential Candidates, Formatted to Fit Your Screen

''You used to be big,'' Joe Gillis says to Norma Desmond, the faded movie actress, when he meets her in ''Sunset Boulevard.'' You may remember what she says in reply: ''I am big. It's the pictures that got small.''

Perhaps this is the moment, early in an uninspiring and seemingly endless presidential campaign, to construct a Sunset Boulevard theory of politics. Or at least to raise the question: Has the whole enterprise shrunk down to insignificance as the new century begins? Or is it just the politicians who have gotten small?

Certainly they look small, in just about all the arenas in which national affairs are debated. The presidential front-runners, the leaders in Congress, the people who turn up on political talk shows -- all seem painfully lacking in a certain quality. I'm not sure I can define it precisely, but I know it when I don't see it.

Try to imagine an Eisenhower or a Kennedy of the year 2000 -- or even a Sam Rayburn or an Everett Dirksen. They don't fit in the context of today's political debate. It isn't because they were more brilliant than the politicians of the present, or because they were morally superior. It's because somehow they managed to be large figures to most of us who watched them perform. Whatever virtues Al Gore and George W. Bush and Dennis Hastert and Dick Gephardt might possess, they aren't larger than life. Much of the time they have to struggle just to be taken seriously.

I notice this, and then I think of a simple explanation for it. Americans who grew up in the time of Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy are getting old. All the stage sets of youth -- schoolyards, summer camps, Main Streets -- take on a disconcertingly shrunken quality when one confronts them a generation later. It's only reasonable that the actors would begin to look smaller as well. There's a caption from an old British cartoon: ''Nearly all our best men are dead -- Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning . . . I'm not feeling very well myself.'' It's an appropriate warning.

But is that all there is to it? Is the shrinkage of public figures merely an annoyance of middle age that one must simply get used to? I doubt it. Dennis Hastert will never be Sam Rayburn, Al Gore is no Jack Kennedy, and George W. Bush will never achieve the gravitas of Dwight Eisenhower. There are qualitative differences in public stature for which nostalgia is an insufficient explanation.

Well, then, as Norma Desmond might say, perhaps it's the scripts that aren't much good any more. The larger-than-life politicians had larger-than-life issues to talk about: the battle against Communism, the threat of nuclear war, a civil rights struggle of inescapable moral dimension. They also performed at a time when many Americans, if not most, believed in the ability of the federal government to solve the toughest social and economic problems.

We live at a time of no such stirring conflicts, and of an eroded sense of governmental possibility all across the board. So maybe the present bunch merely suffers from an absence of good material to work with.

Still, I doubt it. There's no real evidence that prosperous times preclude big public figures. The placidity of everyday life in mid-Victorian Britain didn't prevent Disraeli from establishing a larger-than-life persona -- and maintaining it for decades. I don't think it's the issues that are shrinking American politicians. I think it's the roles they find themselves playing.

Consider for a moment Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Senate Republican leader who died 30 ago. In an odd sort of way, he was a minor-league Disraeli -- a small-town Midwesterner who dreamed of a career on the stage, entered politics as a substitute, and then spent a lifetime cultivating and perfecting his role as a florid, sentimental, slightly pompous, language-loving public orator. Like Disraeli, Dirksen traveled all over the map on national issues -- from New Deal sympathizer to McCarthyite to bipartisan statesman of civil rights -- but the one thing he didn't do was step out of character.

Like most good political roles of that time, Dirksen's required some cooperation on the part of the reporters backstage. They kept to themselves the fact that the master of pretentious eloquence used to walk into the Senate press gallery, put his feet up on a chair and poke fun at the act he was being allowed to get away with. It's true that some of the electorate was on to Dirksen every step of the way, but that didn't really matter. Whether one loved him or hated him, he was a character.

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It is all but unthinkable now for a congressional leader of any kind to build and maintain a public role the way Dirksen did; it may be impossible even for a president. Ronald Reagan did it on the strength of a lifetime in show business and some excellent stage direction from the wings. But Bill Clinton has been unable to create any outsized persona, even though he clearly possesses an undeniable stage presence and no small amount of acting ability.

This is not merely because of his personal flaws; it is because we know too much about him. Not merely about his sex life but about his eating habits and his draft status and his introduction to marijuana at Oxford. It would have been difficult for any human being, even one far more saintly than President Clinton, to make himself into a legend amid the incessant scrutiny that politics in the 1990's has imposed.

The same thing is happening with Al Gore and George W. Bush. Each begins the campaign year as a front-runner struggling for an identity. One becomes folksy in order to seem less dull; the other becomes less folksy in order to seem more intelligent. But the bottom line is that neither has thus far emerged looking remotely large enough for the job.

We have been treated to too much information about Mr. Bush's fraternity days at Yale and Mr. Gore's brief career as a reporter, and this has led inevitably to a vague but disquieting sense of smallness about them. It has also led to the extraordinary rise of Bill Bradley and John McCain as alternatives.

Over the coming months, however, Mr. McCain and Mr. Bradley will undoubtedly begin to shrink. A barrage of mundane personal information waits to be reported and to trim them down to size. It is difficult for any public figure to seem larger than life when the whole country knows his SAT scores or his HDL count.

Every four years, after the election is over, reporters and academics gather to discuss why the campaign was so embarrassing and how future ones could be made more meaningful. Nearly always, the consensus is that the voters need more details about the candidates -- about their records, their biographies and their character -- in order to cast an intelligent vote.

B y and large, the press is now providing these details, and for the most part it is perfectly good journalism. It does create a better informed electorate. It makes the candidates more real, more familiar, more human. It also makes them smaller. It removes the quality of distance without which larger-than-life public figures cannot perform convincingly. And it denies the next generation a set of public role models that once motivated young people, however naively, toward careers in public service.

Norma Desmond almost certainly wouldn't like it. She would be reminded of the fate that befell Hollywood after the Golden Age of silent movies. ''They took the idols and smashed them,'' she complained. ''And who do we have now? Some nobodies.''

It's not that the four main candidates are nobodies. All have been elected to high office more than once, and all are serious public servants. But the unending series of close-ups makes it harder and harder to see any of them as president. There will be times during the coming election year when Norma Desmond's complaint will sound like political prophecy.

Alan Ehrenhalt is the executive editor of Governing magazine and the author